Firearms are popular in the United States and firearm purchases have increased significantly in recent years. The Federal Bureau of Investigation reports that 19,592,303 total background checks were processed by the National Instant Criminal Background Check System (“NICS”) in 2012, compared to 11,177,335 checks in 2007. People purchase firearms for a variety of reasons including hunting, target shooting, collecting, and personal defense.
In the personal defense situation, a person may need to use a firearm to defend against a threat to his or her life. For example in a home invasion scenario, events may unfold rapidly, and emergency services may not be able to respond before the threat materializes. Emergency services have different response times in different locations throughout the United States. Detroit's emergency manager Kevyn Orr stated that Detroit police take an average of 58 minutes to respond to a call versus a national average of 11 minutes. Thus, a person may require a firearm for personal defense and use deadly force if necessary.
Even when a person needs to use a firearm for personal defense, it is desirable to contact emergency services and authorities in an effort to have professionals intervene and address the threat. The traditional means to contact emergency services is through the 9-1-1 emergency telephone number. However, in some instances this requires use of a land line telephone. In a home invasion scenario, a person may not want to travel into another room and possibly alert the intruder. Even if the person has a cell phone available he or she must still dial 9-1-1, then the person must hold the cell phone. These actions necessarily require the person to remove at least one hand from the firearm, which reduces the person's grip on the firearm and negatively impacts the accuracy and precision of the firearm.
Some firearms have integrated communications equipment. Rifles have been contemplated that integrate a radio antenna and other radio components. A description of radios integrated into rifles, pistols, and holsters or other communication means may be found in U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,990,471, 3,530,451, 4,936,037, 4,996,787, and 5,044,107, which are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety. A more modern take of the integrated, radio-enabled firearm detects when a discharge and communicates this information to a remote device. A description of this and similar devices may be found in U.S. Patent Publication No. 2006/0042142 and 2006/0025078, which are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety, and further similar devices may be found in U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,525,966, 5,598,151, 6,363,647, 6,429,769, 6,735,897, 6,802,147, 6,823,621, and 8,339,257, which are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.
However, in order to utilize the radio communications in these devices, a firearm user would have to buy a firearm with a communication system already integrated into the firearm or hire a gunsmith to integrate a communication system into the firearm. Therefore, there is a need for a modular and adaptable communication system that does not require extensive modification of an existing firearm or the purchase of a new firearm.
Further, in personal defense situations, a person may desire to record audio and/or video of the incident for evidentiary or other purposes. The use of deadly force is a serious event. In a situation where a home invader was justifiably killed, a person would benefit from recording the audio and/or video of the home invasion to establish that the person properly defended himself or herself.
Prior art attempts to combine firearms with photographic systems have largely focused on systems that take photographs of the firearm's target, which is described in U.S. Pat. No. 1,955,300, which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. In particular, disclosed therein is a photographic attachment to a firearm that is operationally connected with the trigger of the firearm such that the discharge of the firearm actuates a camera to take a photograph of the target. When used with a revolver, each successive discharge of the firearm will advance film in the attachment and make successive photographs. The technology then progressed to moving pictures, and the motion picture mechanism is operated by the trigger finger of the person using the firearm. Such a device is described in U.S. Pat. No. 2,144,909, which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.
Further improvements to guns outfitted with cameras were disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 2,282,680, which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. The improvements disclosed included a camera that may be affixed to a gun to photographically record its aim at the moment of discharge, the camera being activated by the recoil of the gun. Of particular interest, the camera disclosed therein is intended to be moved from gun to gun, and the camera shutter is adjustable, such that the camera activation may be made at various stages of recoil.
Additional incremental improvements may be found in U.S. Pat. No. 3,427,102 (camera actuating member located at the rearward end of the rifle stock, permitting a hunter or other shooter to actuate the camera by forcibly urging the rifle stock against his shoulder), U.S. Pat. No. 4,309,095 (a device comprising a set of brackets for supporting a conventional film camera to the telescopic sight of a firearm, and in particular a rifle), U.S. Pat. No. 4,835,621 (a video camera recording device attached to a structure resembling a rifle that can be raised to the shoulder and sighted at an object in much the same way that a gun is usually raised to the shoulder and aimed), U.S. Pat. No. 6,070,355 (a gun-mounted video camera including a gun, a video camera connected to the gun for accepting video images of a target of the gun and a display attached to the gun by a hinge), U.S. Pat. No. 6,556,245 (a video camera is provided which can be mounted to a firearm or a bow, primarily for recording game hunting, the camera having a quick release mount system that allows the video camera to slide onto and off of the weapon, the camera having a liquid crystal display so the hunter may monitor what the camera is recording), U.S. Pat. No. 6,580,876 (a telescopic rifle scope/sight that is fully integrated with a compact digital camera, and an alternative embodiment where the invention eliminates the telescopic rifle scope, but maintains the compact digital camera), U.S. Patent Publication No. 2012/0276954 (a portable camera and surveillance device), and U.S. Pat. No. 8,690,460 (a camera phone mount for a weapon scope), which are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety.
With respect to audio, the prior art has conceived of a microphone on the person's belt that begins to record audio when the pistol is removed from its holster. A description of this device and other similar devices may be found in U.S. Pat. No. 5,479,149, which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety. However, recording audio from the waist of a person is not optimized to record the audio of a conversation between a home owner and an intruder because the microphone is not positioned between the home owner and the intruder, and an item such as clothing may cover the microphone and obstruct any audio recording.
An audio/visual recording device may be found in U.S. Patent Publication Nos. 2006/0082730, 2008/0060248, and 2015/0198406, which are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety; and U.S. Pat. Nos. 8,496,480 and 4,309,095, which are incorporated herein by reference in their entirety. However, the device in the '730 publication requires the device to be disposed on the top of the firearm to record both downrange and the person wielding the firearm. A device that is mounted on top of a firearm necessarily obstructs the user's field of view. Even when the device is mounted to the side of the firearm's sight, a user's field of view is still limited and there is an increased likelihood that a user will miss cues from the environment, including threats to the user's health. The device in the '248 publication is limited to peer-to-peer network due to security issues, and thus a user may not transmit an emergency call or audio/visual data across a cell phone network. Therefore, there is a need for an audio/visual recording device that does not disrupt the field of view of the person and that may transmit data on any network to any user or remote device.